Fake Page Rank Problem

Hi Guys

Have a interesting problem for a change. During some recent link building, I got a link from a PR7 site which was great, until I got suspicious and checked out the site properly (Don't want to publicly disclose the site yet) and discovered they only have one linking root domain with all internal pages with PR n/a.

Checking with friends it seems these guys have a fake PR7, gained by spamming the page rank tool bar. Have already requested the site remove the link but getting nothing back.

Anybody else ever run into this problem?

How worried should I be?, should I use the disavow tool and forget it?, should I really push to get the link removed?

Is the link on a relevant site?
Is the site within googles guidelines?

If you can answer yes to both of those, why do you care about the toolbar PR? You should be building links to help your rankings, not to gain toolbar PR, because that's not going to make you rank #1 for your terms!

To the original poster: I agree with those who tell you not to worry about one link. However, a couple of observations:

1. You do not sound like an SEO, yet it seems that you are engaged in "link building," presumably buying links or engaging in link exchanges. And it sounds like you are doing this without performing a careful analysis of the linking sites. You had better know exactly what you are doing (i.e. be an expert), otherwise this might be a surefire recipe for ranking disaster, especially in view of this year's Google updates.

2. "Checking with friends it seems these guys have a fake PR7, gained by spamming the page rank tool bar." This sentence is meaningless from an SEO point of view. A fake page rank can generally obtained by temporarily 301-redirecting a site to on with the desired page rank, waiting for a Google PR update, and then removing the redirect. When this is done, the fake PR obtained from that other site continues to appear until the next PR update, and then the fake PR drops to the page's real PR.

To check if the PR is fake, run this search on Google:
info:example.com
(no space after the colon)

If the PR is genuine, the domain displayed in the search result will be the same as the one used in the search. For example, when I search for
info:google.com
teh search result returned is:
www.google.com

This means Google is not faking its PR (surprise!). But if the search returns a DIFFERENT domain, that's the domain from which the fake PR has been sponged. This is useful to know know in our business.

3. If the PR7 that you are seeing is NOT fake, then it probably comes from links on a private SEO network, and the reason you are not finding those links is because the network blocks public link checkers. The PR may not be fake, but you definitely want to stay away from such networks, especially if you are not an SEO, although a single link will do you no harm.

A fake page rank can generally obtained by temporarily 301-redirecting a site to on with the desired page rank, waiting for a Google PR update, and then removing the redirect.
To check if the PR is fake, run this search on Google:
info:example.com
(no space after the colon)

If the PR is genuine, the domain displayed in the search result will be the same as the one used in the search....

There are other ways to fake pagerank also ie using a pointing service where multiple domain names are pointed at the domain with the page rank (requires something else also but do not want to encourage this behavior so not saying what). Does your check work for this form of faking Page rank?

Over 50% are invariably "Fake' and if you are in the biz of Buying Domains, you probably need a cheap reliable source of Dropped Domains, and you will already know that checking +200,000 per day is not viable without automation.

The KickAssBot will sort the "Real" from the 'Fake', and then check, Age, Google indexing, and even if the "Real" have SEOMOZ qualifiers.